On Mon, 05 Jan 2009, MJ Ray wrote: > Ron <r...@debian.org> wrote: > > Do you really think it would have been difficult to obtain 2Q seconds > > for a resolution to recall the previous vote, and postpone it until > > some of the more obvious glitches had been better ironed out? [...] > > Yes, based on the summary of other votes by Wouter Verhelst and others.
I don't really think you can extrapolate from examples of past votes that got considerably more seconds than they required to suggest that proves we'll have trouble getting enough seconds for important issues. In fact if past votes had regularly got 600+% more seconds than they had required that would suggest to me that some large proportion of people didn't actually understand the system they were participating in. It makes _no_ difference how many people second once the required number is reached, so except in a few rare cases I _would_ quite expect most thinking people (the type I'd most prefer to be involved in any vote) to resist the urge to post more of them just for the "me too" value of it. Those results are not surprising, and if anything make it clear we can easily get more seconds for notable issues than is currently required. How many more is debatable, but this isn't very good evidence for your assertion that 30 people is a "very high" bar. > So, are supporters hoping this situation will change, only a few > well-connected DDs will be able to propose GRs, or what? I don't consider myself "well-connected", but I don't really have much doubt that I'd be able to get 30 people to put their hand up if I had an issue of project-wide importance that we needed to decide upon in a way that would be suitable for a vote. If I couldn't do that, I'd expect to lose anyway, and approach the problem in some other manner. > > We seem to have totally lost the goal of making decisions that affect > > many or all developers by consensus. The process of building consensus > > revolves around satisfying the concerns of people who see problems with > > your planned course of action to arrive at a Better Solution. If you > > can't get the consensus of around 30 people to begin with, it doesn't > > take a degree in advanced math or political science or military strategy > > to arrive at the conclusion that you are a LONG WAY from having the > > consensus of the whole project. > > In general, that's correct. In general? You have some specific counter example in mind where just 5 people really do represent a consensus of the project?? > In particular, if you need 30 people just to *start* the discussion period, Other people already answered this. It only needs _one_ person to post about something to start a discussion. The _formal_ discussion period is limited in length, and IMO quite short. Far too short in fact to actually achieve a real, well considered, consensus in that time. You need to start this process WAY BEFORE it ever gets to a formal "last chance for discussion" period. Else you are just certain to still have disagreements by the time the vote _must_ be held, and the looming vote can only further polarise opinions. With a vote imminent, the incentive to find workable compromise is minimal indeed. > that's going to kill many potential options before they have any chance of > building consensus Many _potential_ options need to be 'killed' or integrated with other options to build the larger consensus. This is an absolutely essential part of the process. If we have 1021 potential voters and they all separate into groups of 5 to push their own option or else, then we will have ... wait for it ... 204 options on each ballot. And that's before some people second more than one option ... I have lots of stupid ideas every day. I don't for a minute believe that all of them are worthy of inflicting on other people. But sometimes I do need to inflict them on a just a couple of people before their true stupidity is apparent and they can be shelved. And occasionally, surprisingly, one tiny little part of that idea will be the seed for something bigger. Learning when to let go of the crappy bits is a valuable lesson. Ideas are like children, most people think their own are completely faultless. > and others will be far too entrenched by the time public > discussion starts; also, it's 30 DDs, not 30 people. I'm not sure what you aim to imply there? Are DDs more like sheep than 'people' are or vice versa? If people can't recognise a truly Better idea just because it wasn't the first one to gain some measure of support, then we are already doomed and the rules for voting don't matter squat anyhow. > so I've moved from seeking amendments, to emphasising > the profound problems in the proposal ... > Here's a summary list of concerns I mentioned in other emails:- > 1. 2Q is unjustified and excessive; The justification (or perhaps 'last straw') is the poor quality of recent vote options, where many people even had quite some difficulty figuring out what the difference between any two options were. We don't need 'vanity' options on a poll that are essentially identical except for some disagreement between two groups of 5 people that isn't clear at all to anyone else. Condorcet may be a lovely system for presenting many options but if people can't figure out what the difference is between them, or what the effect of them will be, then it still isn't going to work very well for making decisions. The exaggeration about how big a change this is seems excessive, but I don't think 30 / 1000 is by most normal scales of excess. > 2. the obvious spoiler effect may exclude consensus options > prematurely (interaction of thresholds and Condorcet voting); Sorry, but that sentence is just entirely self-contradictory and unparseable to me ... Whatever effect you speak of is not 'obvious' to me, and if options _had_ consensus clearly there'd be more than 30 people supporting them and they wouldn't be excluded ... The only thing that might be excluded is options that were prematurely pushed toward a vote ... and if they have the potential for real consensus, they can always be put to a vote later once that is clear. > 3. it favours organised campaign groups who gather in secret before > springing discussion on debian lists; It's harder to keep secrets among a group of 30 than it is among a group of 5. I don't see how this works in the favour of that sort of thing. Either they are a focus group that comes up with something worthwhile that people will support, or a bunch of dangerous wackos that we'll vote down when it gets that far. > 4. it encourages defending proposals too early, during the discussion > period. I don't follow that either. My whole point is the _real_ discussion should all be taking place well before any formal process is started. By the time the discussion period for an actual vote begins, it should all be about honing the last few little details, not about "let's start from a position of polar opposition and hostile antagonism and give ourselves two weeks to sort that out". You don't have to be a genius among profound thinkers to place a good bet on how that will turn out. We want to STOP this sort of behaviour, not entrench it more deeply than it has already dug itself. So I guess I'm sorry. As much as I really do want to understand and resolve your concerns, I don't find them particularly 'profound' as stated here. I won't discount that I'm just too stupid to understand them, but in that case the onus would be on you still to convince me of their merits. Loaded explanations like "unjustified and excessive" only work if you are preaching to the choir. For the rest of us, that will need to be backed up with some justification of your own if we are to understand what injustice and excess really concerns you here. > I don't think a 600% increase is a conservative step. Fortunately this is just an error in your math :) Let's see: 5 / 1021 = 0.004897, let's say 0.5% of potential voters. 30 / 1021 = 0.029382, let's say 3% I don't think a < 2.5% change in the proportion of DDs required to hold a vote and declare the result a "General" resolution really puts us in the scope of some sort of radical revolution. Claiming this is a 600% increase is, well, unjustified and excessive I would say :) The actual change itself seems very, very, moderate without the application of creative accounting. > don't you think there's a risk of this moving the project to > votes where the options have simply been composed by *larger* > warring factions? Well if you really believe that might be a problem, then surely you'd be in favour of my actually radical suggestion to raise this threshold to something like 80% of people in the keyring? The larger we make the factions, the more they'll have to solve their _own_ infighting before they make their dispute everyone else's problem to decide. Funnily enough that's EXACTLY how building a consensus does, should, and must start. Can I count on you to second this if I propose it? Or do you think this should be shot down summarily if I can't find 4 other people who agree? Would it be better if I had to find 30 people, or 50%, or 80% to do that? > Alternatively, would it make the path of least resistance "ignore > everyone else whenever possible because they'll never get 30 or 60 > DDs together"? Are you saying that if I ever vote with some faction I will never be able to "cross the floor" and vote with a different group of people who I agree more with on some totally different topic? > I wonder if there is a need for a more radical reform where once a > proposal reaches the required number of seconds to trigger a vote, a > ballot jury takes over and runs a vote which includes the proposal, > the status quo, and a set of alternatives where the whole population > would vote *for* at least one option, and reasonable combinations > thereof. Isn't that how Condorcet voting works best? Wait, I'm confused again ... if you are worried about secret groups of 30 people having too much power to influence the project, where are we going to get this jury from, and who will watch the watchers? Unless you are gunning for a seat on such a body I don't see what this gains us over putting the onus on proposers to establish that their ideas are sufficiently refined to have a reasonable level of support among the ordinary rank and file developers. We don't need _more_ power structures, we need to limit the abuse of them by small groups of people with an axe to grind or an agenda to push. We especially need to limit the people who spend more time on this sort of busywork politik than they do on making actual useful contributions to the project. We AREN'T a democratic body, we are an almost entirely disparate group of software developers trying to build a common body of useful software. We DON'T need a layer of middle management to succeed at that. If we NEVER have another vote for anything more significant than who gets to wear the DPL hat until they disgrace themselves, then I would consider that a MAJOR SUCCESS in refining our collaborative process. But I can accept that I'm dreaming the impossible dream on that one too, and there will be times when AS A WHOLE we must make some statement or decision on some issue. Any vote that passes by 50.01% cannot be said to have achieved that aim. Every time we have one of those we divide ourselves down the middle, and a few more people unsubscribe permanently from one or more of our mailing lists, and put a few more people on their personal shit-list. If you are worried about the vast majority of people who ignore what goes on in -vote most of the time, then the answer is simple. Make what you do there more relevant. The bickering and the wrangling is not attractive to people who care about the code or the project. Once that starts leaking out to affect us again anyway, should you really be surprised that we'll build our own consensus to rise up and stop you from doing that? We may not have that consensus yet. But it's growing. And the more thoughtless, ugly votes we have, the more people will refine that consensus until we either get it right, or we splinter entirely and leave the vote-mongers behind. It's not really rocket science, not once you've seen it once or twice before. The interesting question is can we stop it before it metastasises and rots a perfectly good project to the core. If we can, I think we WILL have done something truly unique in the face of history. So I'm hopeful. And telling it like I see it here in the hope others will have the clues that I'm missing and we'll finally get it right. But this isn't something we can get right with a straight up or down vote, no matter how many options we put on the ballot. We need to talk this through until either everyone's strong objections can be assuaged, or it becomes perfectly clear that their objections are about personal power struggles and not the best interests of the project as a whole. If we don't have the patience to do that, well, I guess we'll just have another fucked up vote, and everyone will get nudged just a little bit further in one direction or the other, and whoever is left will do this all again next year ... So that's about it from me, unless someone has something new and particularly interesting to add I'm just going to get on people's nerves from here on too. I'm happy to talk to people in private if they wish (and they can summarise that later if it's worthwhile), but I don't want to join the ranks of people who just repeat themselves over and over and over in the vain hope that this will win people over to their way of thinking. If enough people disagree with me that strongly, clearly we are in no position to put it to a vote, so I'll just wait patiently until they or I wise up sufficiently to find some common ground about this problem. It clearly won't go away now until we do something proactive about it. Patiently, Ron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
